Below you'll find the posts at Sugarrae from the affiliate marketing category. I highly recommend you read each of them if you're serious about making an income as an affiliate marketer.
If you already know about affiliate marketing and want to get straight to the tips and strategies for making more money with it, click here.
If you're not familiar with affiliate marketing or are unsure of how it works, keep reading.
Affiliate marketing allows you to recommend products and services from other companies and be paid a commission if someone buys the product as the result of your recommendation. To track which purchases happens as a result of your recommendation(s), the merchant will provide you with a special link to use when linking to their website that contains a unique referral code assigned to you. If people click that unique link, and buy the product or service within a specified timeframe (the timeframe varies depending on the merchant), you get a commission on the sale.
The products cost the consumer the same amount of money as it would if they didn't buy it through your affiliate link, but the merchant pays you a referral fee for generating the sale. For a visual explanation of this process, click here.
Absolutely. Affiliate marketing is a viable and legitimate way to monetize your blog or website. Tens of thousands of merchants run affiliate programs and will pay you a commission for sending them sales. However, there are some scams centered around affiliate marketing. You'll find information on how to spot affiliate scams – and avoid them – here.
The easiest way to find affiliate programs to promote is to check if the people selling products and services you love have an affiliate program – assuming those products and services would be relevant to the visitors to your blog or website. There are also multiple ways to find new quality products or services to promote to your audience based on their interests. You'll find more information on how to do this here.
Yes and no. You should never pay to become an affiliate for a merchant's program. Joining and promoting an affiliate program is a free opportunity. If someone is asking you to spend money to become their affiliate, then you're being presented with an affiliate scam and should steer clear of that program.
While joining affiliate programs is a free opportunity, it's a business – and like any business, it will cost some money to start and run it. But those costs will be associated with building, running and promoting your blog or website. There are many tools – free and paid - you can use to assist you with all of these processes. I list a few of my favorite affiliate marketing tools here.
Yes and no. Affiliate marketing can generate passive income, but the passive side of the income usually only follows putting in a few years of hard work to generate the brand and audience you'll need to begin generating those passive sales. I have multiple sites earning passive income, but each of those sites took a lot of front end work to build up to that point. And not every site gets to the point of passive income. Some sites require continual maintenance though the revenue they generate can also allow you to pay for that maintenance to be done vs. you needing to do it yourself.
Anyone promising to teach you how you can make thousands without putting in much work is selling you the dream and should be avoided.
I offer a ton of free resources, tips, guides and tutorials here on my website that can help you get started in affiliate marketing – and help you find success with it. While there are plenty of paid training programs out there, you need to be careful. Some of the people who create these programs make their money by selling the dream and not through doing true affiliate marketing for products or services outside of selling you the dream. That's not to say there are not some good training programs out there - but buyer beware. For now, I'd recommend you start with my free information here on my website – and to sign up for my free weekly newsletter here.
I've been doing affiliate marketing – successfully – for well over a decade. While I earn affiliate income from this website, I've made the bulk of my affiliate revenue from selling real users products and services – in multiple niches - that have nothing to do with the making money online niche. I've been nominated as Affiliate of the Year three times in the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards – taking home the award in 2016. I've spent the last decade+ teaching people how to find success with affiliate marketing - based on my own experiences - as well as advocating for the industry as a whole. I'm often blunt and can sometimes be controversial, but I'm also 100% bullshit free.
If you have suggestions for posts you'd like to see me do or information you'd love to see provided, please feel free to contact me and let me know.
I recently was complaining about an affiliate program on Twitter and my pal netmeg asked that I do a post as sort of a public service announcement to affiliate program managers on the things we affiliates find insanely annoying about their programs - ... Read More
My newest newsletter subscribers for the last week or so have been getting an automated message asking what's holding them back in affiliate marketing. While the message is automated, my reading of them and responses are not (my email is something I ... Read More
Recently I've been doing some articles aimed at the beginner affiliate - like how you can avoid affiliate marketing scams and how you can find reputable affiliate programs to promote.After spending over a decade in the Internet marketing ... Read More
On my latest post about avoiding affiliate marketing scams, a commenter named Chance Hoggan asked the following question in the comments:"Where would you recommended people go to find affiliate products to promote?"Since this was also brought ... Read More
I see a lot of newbies to the affiliate arena ask the question of whether or not affiliate marketing (associate marketing, whatever you want to call it) is a scam, especially when they see a two (or more) tiered program (meaning affiliates can earn ... Read More
As a "higher profile" affiliate marketer and SEO persona, I often have people sifting around trying to figure out what all of my sites and niches are.They know I'm successful and that leads to both curiosity and duplication.Unless you're an ... Read More
I think it was during a session I was speaking in at a conference that someone asked me recently how someone should deal with negative reviews left by site visitors on affiliate review sites of merchants the site is an affiliate for. The person had ... Read More
A few weeks ago, Nick Reese sent me a copy of his "soon to be published" e-book called Traffic and Trust. He had mentioned having read my stuff over the years and how much he liked it and said that he'd love to get my opinion on the book:"After ... Read More
So a few months ago I kind of accidentally started a very popular series... Creating a small niche affiliate site - part 1, part 2 and part 3. Even though I started the series without a "plan" so to speak, I fully intended to finish it (especially ... Read More
If you missed part one or part two of this [insert unknown number here] part series, you'll likely want to go back and read through them first. For those of you that are already up to speed, it's time to get back to work.The writer I hired in ... Read More
Last week I mentioned the steps I'd taken so far in building a small niche affiliate site. I decided to do a bit more work on it this week, so I guess we're now on to step two in the series. I'm building this site using tools/strategies that are ... Read More
Not every site I personally build is in a big niche with goals to be the uber site of its industry. While all of the sites I make through MFE aim for that, every once in a while I get bored and spend some time creating a new small affiliate site in a ... Read More
